Interesting piece. I'm pretty sure there's not much evidence either way that Genghis Khan had red hair/green eyes or not. Nor do I think it matters regarding his skills as a leader, warlord, emperor and genius/ruthless military tactician. However, I think it does matter in the sense of showing how much trade, contact and ethnic mixing was going on between the peoples of China, Central Asia, and Europe -- long before Marco Polo ever ventured across the region. Alexander the Great, as well as Roman legions established outposts and independent empires as far as present-day Uzbekistan, so there were lots of Europeans running around Central Asia in the centuries before Genghis. And, of course, the Mongols for centuries traded with fair-haired people to the north in Russia. Proof that red hair was likely fairly common among the Turkic people of Central Asia is the fact that Timur, who ruled out of Samarkand, was described as having red hair by Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, a Spanish emissary who spent two years in Timur's court and wrote extensively about the Central Asian emperor. And when Soviet scientists opened Timur's tomb in 1941 and disinterred him, they discovered that his beard was indeed red. Again, this is interesting not from an ethnic superiority perspective, which is bunk, but rather as evidence of far more mixing and trade among ethnic groups in the region than previously assumed. Here's my recent piece about Timur, if you're interested: https://hiddencompass.net/story/the-curse-of-timur/